High-Placed Substitutes

School Administrator, August, 1997

Teachers in the Harford County Schools in northern Maryland have learned to prepare detailed lesson plans that show evidence of best practices because they never know when their next substitute teacher could be the superintendent or one of his deputies.

Jeff Grotsky, who assumed the superintendency a year ago, spends one full day each month as a classroom substitute, and he has directed 55 other administrators to do the same. Most of their day-long subbing assignments are planned well in advance to cover absent tea hers on in-service days. By the time school ended in June, the administrators had accumulated some 450 days of substitute teaching.

The motivation was not monetary or public relations gimmickry. "It gives us a chance to be reconnected" and to observe "what's going on in the classroom," Grotsky says.